Identifying Idiomatic Expressions Using Phrase Alignments in Bilingual Parallel Corpus

Previous efforts to identify idiomatic expressions using a bilingual parallel corpus have focused on the method of using word alignments to catch the sense of individual words. In this paper, we propose a method of using phrase alignments rather than word alignments in a parallel corpus to recognize the sense of phrases as well as words. Our proposed scoring functions are based on the difference of translation tendency between a phrase and individual words. They can help us identify idiomatic expressions with a entropy variation and a translation difference between a phrase and individualwords. Experimental results show that our proposed method is more effective than previous approaches for the identification of idiomatic expressions. In addition, we proved that linguistic constraints can be integrated into our method to improve the performance.

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